[Discuss] html lock

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 1/26/21 8:09 AM, MC wrote:
> any hope to lock html code? to prevent wholesale download and content 
> theft? let's bypass the "don't post it" strategy. Don't want a 
> username/passcode option either. these websites must surface on 
> standard google searches and be readily accessible.

Think back to the bad-old-days of copy protection and pull similar tricks.

To protect your HTML, javascript, and CSS, maybe some sort of 
obfuscation. Any symbolic names in your control could be mangled into 
randomish strings. Might be whitespace mangling you could do, too. 
Except smart editors can probably undo that easily.

To protect against the user who wants to copy/paste text, make the text 
pictures?

To protect against the user who wants to save a picture, harder. I've 
seen tricks of putting a larger transparent picture (or something like 
that) on top of the picture you want to protect, making it hard to 
right-click save the picture. Might be a way to do that with text, too.

To keep users from printing cartoons I've seen cartoons in color, and 
pretty dark. Goes to mud in B&W, expensive to print in color.

To protect against wholesale traversal of your content turn your site in 
a program that is talked to over the web and not individual URLs that 
work independently. Add timing and captcha tricks to catch web scraping 
bots. Fingerprint clients and slow down more and more for any that are 
looking at too many pages. But now you just broke search engines, try to 
hack a way to fix them.

What a mess.

Roughly, what you need to do is ruin your life and spend all your time 
obsessed that someone is stealing your stuff and incrementally fighting 
them with every waking hour, while you incrementally repair legit users 
search engine access that you just broke.


It your content really that valuable? Most web sites hunger for clicks 
and eyeballs, but your stuff is so good people want to vacuum it up?


-kb